mfunk9786 wrote:Not to play devil's advocate, but I saw the Clinton campaign as "a dialogue" in the sense that they were doing a whole lot of telling people what's good for them, and that backfired terribly. If anything, letting the Trump administration's actions speak for themselves is what's going to rescue us from a lot of this. In these special elections, dissatisfaction with the current government's handling of healthcare is most voters' #1 issue.

I hope so, but political populism was a result of a disenchantment with mainstream politics and I’m not sure that will just go away when Trump‘s time is over. It’s not just happening in the US, it’s happening all round the world. People want to hear about easy solutions to complex problems and I’m not sure they even listened to Clinton, they were too peroccupied with conspiracy theories in regard to her. and Clinton wasn’t a great communicator and for a Democrat, pretty right wing herself. Maybe they are more likely to listen to a sitcom.

The thing is:

There are "easy" solutions to complex problems. They're just not politically easy. The point is: to change the politics. A tax on capital (recommended by Thomas Pikkety). A national program of full-employment/public works jobs for all (recently, to my great surprise, endorsed in the NYT by Clinton's former treasury secretary and Goldman Sachs vet Robert Rubin). Medicare-for-All (which was dismissed, sneeringly, by Hillary Clinton as a "fantasy," a fairly grotesque thing to say in an extremely wealthy country in which tens of millions have no health insurance even after the Democrats's reform).

But notice what these all have in common? The ruling class has no interest in any of these things. And they openly scorn or fear the working class politics that would be needed to achieve them.

People are correct when they balk at a very affluent technocrat who tells them "sorry, but you and your children's future are gonna have to be tougher and harder because...uh...the Market" even as the rich get visibly richer and richer all around them.

I saw the episode in question. Roseanne and her muslim neighbor are in line at the grocery store and they bond over the fact that they both have to buy groceries with SNAP cards. The cashier then tells the muslim woman she can't buy a rotisserie chicken with her SNAP card cause it counts as "prepared food." And Roseanne then sarcastically says "yeah, because apparently that counts as a luxury. We get prepared foods and rich people get yachts." The cashier then says racist shit to the muslim woman. Roseanne then uses her SNAP card to pay for her neighbors groceries then tells off the cashier.

So let's break this down: Roseanne starts off as a bigot then begins to rise above that bigotry through working class solidarity with "the other" specifically through our meager American welfare state. How is that "reactionary"? Fighting-racism-through-class solidarity is kinda "labor movement politics" 101.

Roseanne is a psycho reactionary who's politically all over the place but the writers room is clearly dominated by lefties.